The advent of Internet-based applications and their resulting multi-tier distributed architecture has changed the focus of design for large-scale Internet computing. For example, internet server applications typically execute in a horizontally scalable topology across hundreds or thousands of commodity servers in an Internet data center. Consequently, increasing scale and power density have a significant impact on the thermal properties of a data center and its physical environment. As referred herein, a data center is a location or facility that houses mainly electronic equipment, such as computers and communications equipment, for handling the data necessary for desired operations, such as information technology (IT) operations.